Hamilton Fish

Hamilton Fish (3 August 1808-7 September 1893) was a member of the US House of Representatives (W-NY 6) from 4 December 1843 to 3 March 1843 (succeeding James G. Clinton and preceding William W. Campbell), Governor of New York from 1 January 1849 to 31 December 1850 (succeeding John Young and preceding Washington Hunt), US Senator from New York from 1 December 1851 to 3 March 1857 (succeeding Daniel S. Dickinson and preceding Preston King), and US Secretary of State from 17 March 1869 to 12 March 1877 (succeeding Elihu B. Washburne and preceding William M. Evarts).

Biography
Hamilton Fish was born in New York City, New York in 1808, and he came from a prominent family of wealthy Dutch-Americans. Upon graduation from Columbia University, he passed the bar, worked as New York's commissioner of deeds, and ran unsuccessfully for the State Assembly in 1834 as a Whig candidate. In 1843, he was elected to the US House of Representatives, and he was elected Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1847 and Governor a year later. In 1851, he was elected to the US Senate. He served on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and he became a member of the Republican Party after the Whigs dissolved. Fish was a moderate on the issue of slavery, disapproving of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery. After traveling to Europe, Fish returned to America and supported Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. During the American Civil War, he raised money for the Union war effort and made successful arrangements for Union and Confederate prisoner exchanges. He returned to his law practice after the war, and President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Fish Secretary of State in 1869. Fish reorganized the State Department and established civil service reform, and he implemented the new concept of international arbitration to replace military conflict. He became involved in a feud between Senator Charles Sumner and President Grant after Grant unsuccessfully attempted to annex the Dominican Republic, and, in 1871, he organized a naval expedition to Korea in a failed attempt to open trade. Fish left office and politics in 1877, and he died in Garrison, New York in 1893 at the age of 85.